Automating security policies (compliance) with Rudder

Designing, applying and keeping track of security-oriented rules for your IT infrastructure can be time-consuming, costly and approximate job. Whether you're in charge of defining the policy, implementing it or checking for discrepencies, you'll be aware that all of this takes time, often out-of-hours time, that there is a lot of room for error and usually a considerable gap between ideals and reality - just how big a gap may or may not be shared with everyone involved.

This talk will show how Rudder, an open source stack for automating configuration and auditing, can be used to ease and improve on several of these issues. Topics covered will include deploying identical settings everywhere, saving time for multiple changes, near real-time auditing of actual settings, gaining global overview to help analyze vulnerability impacts, and improved reactivity. I will include real-life examples and feedback from several companies where this has been put into action, including benefits (of course) and shortcomings (because there are always some).

The aim of this session is to discuss methods and the approach of automation applied to this field, while demonstrating and giving feedback on some of the possibilities offered by Rudder. I hope to avoid being side-tracked into talking about detailed security recommendations, sticking to simple best practices for the sake of examples, thus focusing on the approach.

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How is this different from “just” automation? Automation vs Compliance How different is this technically? Normation – CC-BY-SA normation.com 12

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How is this different from “just” automation? Frequency The more often you check, the more reliable your compliance reporting is. How can you reach this goal? Lightweight, Run “slow” Focus on theefficient agent checks in the security checks background (file copying Reporting can over network...) be done later Normation – CC-BY-SA normation.com 13

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How is this different from “just” automation? All or nothing Compliance matters on each and every system. Not “most”. All of them. How can you reach this goal?Make sure you Support all the Two systems may know what {old,weird,buggy} be alike on paper,systems exist: {OS,software, they very rarely rely on an versions} are in reality. inventory DB Normation – CC-BY-SA normation.com 14

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How is this different from “just” automation? You cannot get it wrong. You cannot get it wrong. You cannot get it wrong. If you care about compliance, “prod” is usually pretty real. How can you reach this goal? Fake ID + Prebook flight to Cayman islands? Normation – CC-BY-SA normation.com 15

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How is this different from “just” automation? You cannot get it wrong. You cannot get it wrong. You cannot get it wrong. If you care about compliance, “prod” is usually pretty real. How can you reach this goal? Dont touch stuff Start with no changes. Classicyou dont need to. Just check. Dry-run? quality Be specific. control Cover full cycles (reviews...)(One line in a file?) (days, weeks, months...) Normation – CC-BY-SA normation.com 16

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So, what have we actually done? Applied these principles in Normation – CC-BY-SA normation.com 17

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Final thoughtsSummary:- Security compliance is a very demanding type of automation- Possible today with open source tools- Main issue is about how you use them!Next steps?- Authorizations: who can change which parameters? (law vs regulations vs policy...)- Correlate with monitoring data: determine root causes, crosseffects...It works but the tools can be improved:- detect changes (inotify?) - even 1 minute not always enough- dry-run iterations automatically? Normation – CC-BY-SA normation.com 23